Seven decades of chemotherapy clinical trials: a pan-cancer social network analysis
Plain-language summary
The authors performed a social network analysis of authors who published chemotherapy-based prospective cancer trials from 1946 to 2018, tracking how the community grew from fewer than 50 authors to 29,197. By 2018 nearly all authors were connected, but connections tended to cluster within the same or similar fields, a small number of individuals held disproportionate influence, and women were underrepresented and likelier to have lower impact, shorter productive periods, and less centrality. The analysis characterizes the trialist network as a mix of cooperation and competition and projects that parity for new authors by gender may arrive around 2032.
Read the full paper (DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-73466-6).
This is a plain-language summary written for discoverability; the authoritative version is the published paper. Part of Travis Osterman's peer-reviewed publications.